BillFitzmaurice.info

Leland, or anyone else... I recently added some Ashly amplifiers to my gear. Two ne8250pe's and one ne1600pe. Yes, they're designed for install so I'll have to put some xlr and speakON to euroblock pigtails together.

I'm in love with the Protea software and DSP functionality within these amps and being able to have them networked and accessible through my existing gig network and laptop has nearly got me giddy.

Anyway, on to my question; Purely speculation on my part, but it seems that the amps have some sort of load sensing circuitry that's preventing me from getting a voltage reading on the outputs. With speakers disconnected and levels just shy of clipping, I'm not getting any voltage reading at the outputs. Yet, the outputs function as expected with speakers connected.

How might I go about checking voltage and setting limiters in this situation? Should/could I just wire something like a toaster oven to the outputs to provide a dummy resistive load? Primary intent at the moment is just to see what they're putting out for voltage, and secondary intent is setting the brick wall limiters for/at a future time.

Thoughts?

I reckon you should over employ the limiter initially, and keep your master fader down, with speakers connected.
Keep on juggling the limiter and the faders until you get to desired limiting voltage at unity.
Final check, with attenuators down say 1/2, slam your masters up and see if voltage changes, it shouldn't.
If it passes that, back to attenuators on full...

Makes sense Grant. I'll give it a shot. Thanks for the recommendation.

It really doesn't let you measure the output beforehand, but it does let you get the limiters set...

Sooooooo... I just wanted to own up to a mistake I made. On my DMM selection dial, AC and DC voltage are the same selection and it says auto-ranging. I've used other DMM's in the past that read either AC or DC automatically. But this one, I have to press a button and cycle through the "ranges" to get to the AC ranges. I get that auto-range isn't auto-sensing, and I'm aware of what the ranges are. This one's just set up a little different than I thought it was.

Oops. Good to know.

Glad you worked it out!

Sorry, forgot to check in. Glad you figured it out. And yes, Ashly dsp will ruin you forever.